The idea might sound familiar: An opera company leaves its home for an itinerant life performing a handful of new or rare operas each year at venues across New York.

No, it is not the late, lamented New York City Opera, which filed for bankruptcy in October when it failed to raise enough money to continue to mount productions around the city after it left its longtime home in Lincoln Center. It is Gotham Chamber Opera, which, now in its 12th season, is making the leap from operatic start-up to standby, and is exploring what the demise of City Opera might mean for its future.

Gotham, which is dedicated to performing small-scale chamber operas, has been growing in recent years, and is mounting four productions this season — a record. But even as City Opera’s troubles have allowed Gotham to sign better-known singers, and to think about expanding its board and raising more money, officials at the company said they were wary of the perils of trying to grow too fast.

“We don’t want to overstep,” Neal Goren, the company’s founder, artistic director and conductor, said in a recent interview.

Gotham, which began life in 2001 as the Henry Street Chamber Opera, renamed itself when it left its old theater on the Lower East Side a couple of years later and began performing its unusual repertoire in unusual locations, often incorporating its surroundings into its performances.

Its production of “Eliogabalo,” Francesco Cavalli’s Baroque Italian opera about a truly decadent Roman emperor, was performed at the Box, a nightclub and burlesque house of somewhat louche reputation on the Lower East Side. It did Haydn’s “Il Mondo Della Luna,” about a gullible man who is convinced he’s been taken to the moon, at the Hayden Planetarium. And it staged Daniel Catán’s 1991 opera “La Hija de Rappaccini,” about a lush garden filled with poisonous plants, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

On New Year’s Day, the company will mount its next opera, in a co-production with Trinity Church, at St. Paul’s Chapel, on Broadway and Fulton Street. It will be an operatic retelling of the myth of Orpheus — not in the more familiar settings by Monteverdi or Gluck, but what the company says will be the New York stage premiere of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s “La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers,” from 1686.

“It seemed like the perfect environment for this,” Mr. Goren said of the chapel, noting that its balcony would represent the earth and its ground floor the hell where Orpheus would reclaim his dead wife, Eurydice. Mr. Goren, who will conduct from the harpsichord, said that he relished the chance to work with members of the Trinity Baroque Orchestra. (The performance will be repeated on Jan. 3 and 5.)

A small company like Gotham is unlikely ever to replace City Opera, at least not as it was back when it gave more than 100 performances a year at Lincoln Center and mounted productions of grand opera. But Gotham bears more than a passing resemblance, albeit on an intentionally smaller scale, to City Opera’s final seasons. It, too, aims to introduce New Yorkers to new or unusual works unsuited for the grand stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Photo

Christopher Ainslie, center, in “Eliogabalo.”Credit
Richard Termine

“I never had the goal of starting an opera company that would become a fixture in New York,” Mr. Goren said. “It just sort of happened. My goal was actually to raise enough money to do the first show, and see how it goes. And it went crazy well.”

Gotham, whose motto is “where opera gets intimate,” sometimes operates like a guerrilla opera troupe. When it performed at the Box, recalled David Bennett, its executive director, it had to pack up everything after each performance so as not to interrupt the nightclub’s regular late-night shows.

“Everything we brought into that space went out at night, and went out into a truck that was then parked in the meatpacking district overnight,” Mr. Bennett said. “It was almost more choreographed — the load in and load out — than any part of the show.”

The company still mounts works in traditional theaters — in October, it did “Baden-Baden 1927,” four one-act operas commissioned for an avant-garde festival in Germany in 1927, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College — but has found that alternative spaces are often cheaper and more interesting to audiences. Small opera troupes around the nation are increasingly experimenting with site-specific performances.

Gotham still has only three full-time employees, even as its annual budget has grown to about $1.5 million, Mr. Bennett said. It basically spends what it takes in each year, does not have an endowment and does not sell subscriptions.

When possible, it has worked with other groups. After the Charpentier opera in January, it plans to present a double bill in February in a co-production with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Goren said Limor Tomer, the general manager of Met Museum Presents, had invited the company to choose galleries to perform in. The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Arms and Armor Court inspired him to do Monteverdi’s “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” which he described as a “proto-opera” featuring a battle between knights.

“I thought, ‘What could be a more perfect venue for this opera?’ ” he recalled.

The work, on Feb. 26 and 27, will be paired with a newly commissioned work by Lembit Beecher called “I Have No Stories to Tell You,” in the adjacent Medieval Sculpture Hall.

In May, Gotham will present the American premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s “The Raven,” based on the Edgar Allan Poe poem, as part of the New York Philharmonic’s first NY Phil Biennial festival.

That variety of repertoire is nothing new for Gotham, Mr. Goren said.

“I tell people that if Baroque isn’t to your taste, then come see the Rossini, and if Rossini isn’t to your taste, then come see the premiere of Hosokawa,” he said. “We build up people’s expectations just to dash them.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 25, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rare Arias On a Lean Budget. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe